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Invention: Truck-bomb trap

Truck-bomb trap

By Justin Mullins

The US army is worried about suicide bombers targeting its facilities with truck and car bombs. The usual way of combating this is by placing large, heavy obstacles at entrances to prevent such vehicles gaining access, but gives the impression of an area under siege.

Now the army has funded inventor Charles Marsh to come up with an unobtrusive way of stopping unauthorised vehicles. His idea is to dig a truck-sized trench across the access road, and cover it with an aluminium plate strong enough to support the vehicle. In ordinary circumstances, the trench is entirely hidden, but the plate is hinged on one side.

Should a vehicle attempt to cross without authorisation, the plate drops and the vehicle drives into the trench to await appropriate action from security personnel. The invention can also include a hydraulic lift to later raise the vehicle out of the trench.

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Swarming robots system

Set a swarm of robots to explore and map a large area and you will soon find that controlling them all becomes an overwhelming task. It’s simply not possible to control more than handful of robots effectively using a central-command-like structure, says James McLurkin, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, US.

Instead, he says, you are better off allowing the robots talk to each other and, after setting a primary goal such as mapping an area or following a leader, delegating control to them. Funded by the US Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, McLurkin has come up with just such a system.

His robots share data from their onboard optical, electromagnetic, and acoustic sensors with their swarm-mates, and frequently evaluate their ability to complete the task. McLurkin says the beauty of this design is that the number of robots involved can be dramatically increased without placing an overwhelming burden on any central-command structure.

Two videos show that the technique seems to work well in ideal environments for simple tasks such as follow the leader (mpeg format) and “clumping” into groups (mpeg format). The big question is, of course, how well these robots would cope with the real world.

Medical breath test

There is a growing recognition among doctors that the right concentration of a drug in the blood stream is vital for it to be an effective treatment. That means the one-size-fits-all approach to prescriptions – “take two pills three times a day” – is not appropriate for patients when they vary in size, weight, and metabolic rates.

However, reaching and maintaining the desired concentration of a particular drug in the blood stream is tricky, not least because measuring the drug levels within the blood on a regular basis is tricky. Now Richard Melker and colleagues at the University of Florida in Gainesville, US, say the answer may be a mere breath away.

Melker’s team points out that exhaled breath contains water droplets from the lungs that are saturated with chemicals from the blood stream. By condensing this water and analysing it using standard tests, they can get a real time measure of the concentration of many drugs and substances, including various antidepressants, anaesthetics, or measure diabetic’s glucose levels.

The samples can be taken quickly, regularly, and non-invasively, and the measurements they provide used to precisely control the concentration of drug within the blood stream.